Adrienne Edwards Will Co-Curate the 2021 Whitney Biennial

The Whitney Museum of American Art has again reached within its ranks to select Edwards to steward its Biennial exhibition in 2021, which aims to reflect the current social, political and cultural moment through art.

Christopher CoxOctober 22, 2019

Earlier this month the Whitney Museum of American Art announced the names of the two curators in charge of organising the museum’s next Biennial, which will take place in 2021. The curators are David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, two figures who, while relatively new additions to the Whitney’s institutional fold, have been responsible for some of the museum’s most successful recent exhibitions.

Edwards joined the Whitney in 2018 as the museum’s curator of performance. Prior to that, she served as curator of the Performa biennial in New York and as a curator at large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Edwards recently organized the lauded exhibition Jason Moran at the Whitney, which she originally curated for the Walker in 2018. The exhibition, which features a series of musical performances, previously traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. Earlier this year, Edwards organized Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise, a series of performances based on a text co-written by Wu Tsang, Fred Moten, and artist boychild, which featured a collage of words, film, movements, and sounds.

Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said the two curators will make a great team. They will be “working both intellectually and intuitively to fashion an exhibition that captures the complexities, contradictions, frustrations and hopes of the current generation of artists,” he said.

Mr. Breslin and Ms. Edwards said in a statement: “We’re thrilled to take this journey together and couldn’t imagine a better collaboration. We’re looking forward, in the lead up to 2021, to engaging with the prescient artists and thinkers who will inform and inspire this exhibition.”